Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: The fore going is intended to claim a place for a radically social constructivism that does not rely on the metaphysical assumption of ontological givens, avoids on cognitivist abstractions from the communication processes in which we realize ourselves as human beings, but on the embodied and largely linguistic practices of conversing with one another. Languaging is an intrinsically social phenomenon and so are all explanations (...) that are grounded in language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said about language, everything worth talking about is there, nothing is hidden; there is no private language; to which I would add that the cognition we talk of is not private either. (shrink)

This paper offers a non-representational alternative to semiotic notions of meaning as the designatum of signs, the content of messages, or what a text is about. It derives from considerations of how things—artifacts and objects of nature—could mean something to somebody. Rather than treating things as signs of themselves and thereby undermining the two-world ontology of semiotics, it explores the cultural roles that artifacts acquire in the lives of their users and when questions of their meanings arise and how they (...) are answered in conversation. The paper presents a dialogical conception of meaning, which relies on Bateson’s recognition of the importance of multiple descriptions, Wittgenstein’s “seeing as”, theories of embodied narratives, and bricolages involving technology. (shrink)